Tuesday, October 21, 2014

YOU CAN BRING IN EBOLA BUT DO NOT TRY TO BRING IN A BAGPIPE

Steyn on America

Thomas Eric Duncan has the distinction of being America's Patient
Zero - the first but not the last person to develop Ebola symptoms in
the United States.
Is he a US citizen? No, he's Liberian.
Is he a resident of the United States? No, he landed at Washington's
Dulles Airport on September 20th, in order to visit his sister and
having quit his job in Monrovia a few weeks earlier.
So he's a single unemployed man with relatives in the US and no
compelling reason to return to his native land. That alone is supposed
to be cause for immigration scrutiny.
In addition, visitors from Liberia have the fifth highest "visa overstay rate" in the United States. That's to say, they understand very clearly that all that matters is getting in. Once you're in, they'll never get you out.
And, of course, Liberia is one of the hottest spots of Ebola's West
African "hot zone". It's been all over the front pages, except
apparently in The US Customs & Border Protection Staff Newsletter, where it rated a solitary "News In Brief" item at the foot of page 37.
Just to give you an example of how hard-assed the boneheads of America's immigration bureaucracy can be when they want to:
The legendary Gord Sinclair, longtime news director of CJAD in
Montreal, had a ski place near Jay in northern Vermont, and he invited
his engineer on the show to come down and visit him. "What's the purpose
of your visit?" asked the agent at the small rural border post.
"Oh, just a relaxing weekend at my boss' place," said Gord's
colleague affably, and then chortled, "although I don't know if it'll be
that relaxing. He'll probably have me out in the yard chopping wood all day."
So the immigration agent refused him entry on the grounds that he would be working illegally in the United States.
They all had a good laugh about that back on the air on Monday, but
it took forever to straighten out. A single man with contacts in the
United States: He says he's coming for the weekend, but we all
know any Montrealer would willingly trade a job at Quebec's Number One
anglo radio station for casual yard work in Vermont, right?
And yet the unemployed guy from an Ebola hot zone gets in.
Every day CBP agents pull stuff like that weekend-in-Vermont thing,
screwing over perfectly obviously law-abiding persons - tourists,
businessmen, legal residents and, indeed, citizens.
But the Ebola guy gets in.
What is the priority of America's deranged border regime right now? As I wrote two months ago:

This weekend [Campbell Webster] was returning to New
Hampshire from a competition in Canada, which is how a newspaper story
comes to open with a sentence never before written in the history of the
English language:
'BAGPIPERS have expressed their fear over a new law which led to two
US teenagers having their pipes seized by border control staff at the
weekend.'They can chisel that on the tombstone of the republic. On the
northern border, bagpipers are "expressing their fear", while on the
southern border gangbangers have no fear and stroll through the express
check-in.

As do Ebola-bearing Liberians at Dulles. US border security devotes more time and resources to Campbell Webster of Concord bringing in a bagpipe than to Thomas Duncan of Monrovia bringing in Ebola.
Come to that, US border security devotes more time and resources to
my kid bringing in a Kinder chocolate egg from Canada than to Thomas
Duncan bringing in Ebola. Speaking of which, I recount the Great Kinder
Egg Showdown in my new book, which comes out this month. You can pre-order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Indigo-Chapters in Canada, and other retailers.
If you're wondering why the seizure of my kids' chocolate eggs is in
the same book as war and terrorism and all the big-boy stuff, the answer
is it's part of the same story. To function, institutions have to be
able to prioritize - even big, bloated, money-no-object
SWAT-teams-for-every-penpusher institutions like the US Government. You
can't crack down on Kinder eggs, bagpipes and Ebola: At a certain point,
you have to choose. My line with the Homeland Security guys is a simple
one: every 20 minutes you spend on me, or my kids' chocolate eggs, or
Cameron Webster's bagpipe is 20 minutes you're not spending on the guy
with Ebola, or Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The price of bagpipe scrutiny is a big
hole blown in the lives of American families attending the Boston
Marathon, or a bunch of schoolkids in Dallas having to be quarantined
for a vicious, ravaging disease with a high fatality rate.
But, of course, giving additional attention to West African visitors would be racist. Not like terrorizing Scotsmen over their bagpipes.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security expands its curious priorities
from raiding Boston strip clubs for selling knock-off Red Sox T-shirts
to raiding private homes to seize vintage cars that don't meet EPA
standards. And yet more emission creep:

Homeland Security Is Now Helping To Protect Communities From The Effects Of Climate Change

Big Government is, inevitably, stupid government. The bigger it gets
the more it will focus on trivia, and the less it will even be able to
discern the few things it should be doing. But something more
pathological is going on here: "Homeland Security" is more interested in
controlling law-abiding Americans than protecting them.from Steyn on America, October 4, 2014

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About Me

A Texan who loves the truth and hates the lying, cheating, and deliberate prevarication that characterizes so much of our civic discourse these days.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
RIPOSTE, n. 1. Fencing: a quick thrust after parrying a lunge 2. a quick sharp return in speech or action; counterstroke.
- The Random House Dictionary of the English Language...........
You can contact me by sending an email to me at: leorugiens23@gmail.com